Bringing Eddie home

We met them outside the rest stop. They hadn’t gotten him a burger. Pat hustled away to rectify that error. They were trying to walk him on the grass beyond the parking lot. He was obviously nervous. So were they. Felt bad for them. Their stock in trade rescue dogs were, it turned out, Golden Retrievers who had flunked K-9 auditions for various reasons. Too flighty, too exuberant, ADDS, you know.

“Why did Eddie flunk?” I asked. Disobedient? Too aggressive?” Best to find out this kind of shit right away.

“No. None of the cops on the force knew German. So he just slept all the time.”

“Oh.” But there was a big BUT on my mind. “Then why are you afraid of him?”

The two of them, plump mirror images of each other clad in identical track suits and the same dog-people short pale haircuts, said, “He’s a Doberman.” Meaning they were close to my own generation and Dobes were more frightening to them by reputation than wolves or even Rottweilers. Ali as compared to Foreman.

“Okay,” I said. Pat showed up with a double cheeseburger, which Eddie alerted to like a cop spotting a perp and inhaled with an intimidating show of very white teeth.

We signed papers, took possession of Eddie, and got into the car. At first he was agitated. Pat quietly admonished him, “siedeln.” Then he chose his spot. He seemed to prefer the passenger seat.

I let Pat drive and got in back with French fries at the ready in case he got restless. He didn’t. His reputation for sleeping was already bearing fruit.

We arrived home. Nobody cared. When I finished bringing in his personal effects — one blanket, one stuffed rabbit, one heeeavy crate — he was already sacked out with Tommy Boy.

What kind of guardian had we just gone into barely affordable hock for? Early the next morning, we let him out into the dog yard, our cyclone-fenced running space for 15 years of hounds and terriers. The newbies were still sleeping. We hadn’t had to do the 6 am thing since greyhounds came in fresh from the track life. No sooner had we closed the outside door than we heard Eddie…

“Geh von meinem Rasen runter.”

The neighbors had horses who mosied near our property of a morning looking for greener grass. Eddie objected. If he hadn’t been speaking in German, anyone could clearly have understood his sentiment: “GET OFF MY LAWN!”

It appears we now own a guard dog.